


Bringing Rain

by Rod



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Case Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-11-30 00:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rod/pseuds/Rod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick and Greg have to deal with a decomposed body in a sealed room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bringing Rain

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a challenge. My prompt was the following extract from T S Eliot's _What The Thunder Said_ :
>
>> It has no windows, and the door swings  
> Dry bones can harm no one.  
> Only a cock stood on the rooftree  
> Co co rico co co rico  
> In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust  
> Bringing rain  
> 

"Are you sure, Joe?"

Joe Mason leant on his sledgehammer, pushed up his hard hat and nodded at his supervisor. "They've done a damn good job of hiding it, but someone's plastered over a door here. You can just see where the surface isn't quite flat."

"So they got shot of a door, big deal."

"They got shot of a room," Joe corrected him. "Or at least a closet. I measured out the bedrooms either side, and there's a void big enough to make a small bathroom out of."

"What the hell would someone want to do that for?"

"Beats me, boss. Look, should I open it up or not?"

The supervisor thought for a moment. If the void could be turned into something usable, it would save them from having to partition off another area for the extra facilities the new owner wanted. "Go for it," he said.

Joe grinned, rubbed his hands together and picked up his big sledgehammer.

The dry plaster cracked easily, revealing a wooden door beneath. It took several minutes with a chisel to loosen it from its frame, leaving Joe to take the big hammer to the ruined lock. Two heavy blows broke the latch and pushed the door open, partly tearing it from its hinges.

Joe stared in to the darkened room beyond the drunkenly swinging door. "Boss," he called, "you'd better call the cops."

**********

Nick Stokes adjusted his camera, shifted slightly to get a better angle and took another picture. He grinned to himself at the irony of photographing a darkroom. It wasn't the weirdest place that he'd had to process, not by a long way, but it was his first sealed up room. Someone had clearly been watching too many movies.

The body, such as remained, was sprawled on the floor of the small room facing away from the door. Little more than bones remained of it, the decomposed flesh surrounding it in a pool of slurry that Nick was not looking forward to dealing with.

He heard movement behind him and turned to find Greg peering through the broken door.

"Wow," Greg said. "Talk about your locked room mystery."

"What are you doing here?"

"Grissom said you might need a hand here. I'm beginning to think he doesn't like me." Greg wrinkled his nose and declined to step any further into the room, which was just as well in Nick's view. They'd have to stand pretty close together to avoid disturbing the evidence just yet, and Nick could live without that much of a distraction. At least until they got off shift.

"OK, Einstein, what do you see?"

"Vic is probably male from the clothing, what's left of it," Greg said promptly, eyeing the rotted fabric with disdain. He bent down to examine the floor more closely. "The only scuff marks I can see are from the door and there's no visible blood trails, so he was probably killed here and then sealed in."

"Not sealed in alive?" Nick asked, already knowing the answer.

"Wet plaster wouldn't hold. Also he's not bound and he's lying face down away from the door. If he'd been alive he'd have been clawing at the door or sat up against a wall or something like that."

"Not bad, G. Now, how did he die?"

Greg shrugged. "Could be anything from chemical fumes to gunshot. I guess we're going to have to work on that one." He stared in morbid fascination at the skeleton again. "He must have been dead for years."

"Maybe, maybe not," Nick said absently, playing his torch around the darkroom. "In open air a human body can decompose in as little as fifteen months."

Something glinted on the body's clothing. "What's that?" Greg asked, craning forward.

"Why don't you go see?"

"You've got the camera, why don't you?"

"Because he's your superior officer, so he gets to tell you what to do," Brass said from beyond Greg. "You got a problem with that?"

Greg rolled his eyes. "Just give me a minute here," he said and disappeared from Nick's sight. Brass took his place in the doorway, scowled and held a handkerchief over his nose.

Nick grinned and turned back to finish the preliminary photographs. Once the basics of the crime scene were recorded it would be safe to let Greg closer to the body. "What do we know about the house?" he asked, snapping away.

"Bought by one Vincent Carlton a month ago. He's had a construction gang in since then remodelling the place. One of them worked out there was a sealed room, broke in and called us."

"The body's older than that," Nick said absently. "Who sold it to him?"

"Previous owned was a Joseph Keller, inherited when his father John Keller died. He sold it on straight away, and what the hell are you doing?"

Nick looked back at Brass in surprise. Brass in turn was looking at something on the other side of the door, out of Nick's field of view.

"Learning from other people's mistakes." Greg's voice sounded curiously muffled, and Nick saw why as Greg walked into view. He had pulled a set of CSI coveralls over his street clothes, covered his shoes with plastic galoshes, and was wearing a surgical mask to complement his standard issue latex gloves.

"You don't need to try that hard to avoid contaminating the crime scene," Nick told him, trying hard not to laugh.

Greg glared at him. "I'm more worried about the crime scene contaminating me. I remember what you and Sarah smelled like when you brought in that liquefied crazy, and I'm not washing that out of my jeans."

"I'll leave you and the Surgeon General to it then," Brass said, "and see what I can chase down about the Kellers."

"Oh ha ha," Greg muttered at the policeman's retreating back. As Nick paused to watch he picked his way carefully over to the body, avoiding as much as possible the puddle of decomposed goo around it. "It looks like a fragment of brown glass," he said.

Nick drew a breath, ready to stop Greg from disturbing the evidence before it was properly recorded. He relaxed again as Greg carefully placed a scale ruler on the body, pulled out his own camera and took a few pictures of it. Apparently all those talks about procedure had sunk in, Nick thought as he let his gaze wander around the room. His eyes stopped as he saw the reagent bottles of photographic developer.

"That glass wouldn't happen to be curved, would it?" he asked, looking for and finding the space where a bottle should have rested. Sure enough, a tell-tale white ring of residue remained on the shelf.

"Like a beer bottle," Greg confirmed, "and covered in contaminants."

"I was thinking more like these," Nick said, placing his own scale next to the ring on the shelf. "Test it for blood."

A short while and a few photographs later, Nick turned to see Greg holding up two swabs, one stained bright pink. "Positive for blood on the outside, but not on the inside."

Nick nodded. "Bag it and tag it," he said, squatting down to get a better look at the corpse. "Skull's been fractured," he observed.

Greg peered at the body dubiously, obviously not up on what broken heads were supposed to look like. He took a picture anyway. "So death by bottle then?" he asked.

"Could be, we'll let the Doc decide. You check over the body for any more fragments and I'll see if I can find the rest of that bottle."

"Oh sure, save the cushy job for yourself."

Nick chuckled. "Rank hath its privileges," he said, carefully inspecting the trash can for glass, or anything else of potential interest for that matter.

"Yeah, well rank had better watch out or certain of its privileges are going to get taken away."

"You OK over there, G?" Greg had sounded mostly like he was teasing, but there was something slightly off in his voice to Nick's practised ear.

Greg sighed. "I guess I'm still not used to bodies. I'm this close to contaminating the scene big time."

"If you need a break—"

"I'll be OK," Greg snapped. Nick wasn't entirely sure that 'OK' was the right word, but there was a determined set to Greg's shoulders that he knew better than to fight with. Greg wanted to be a CSI badly enough that he wasn't going to back down, even if it cost him his lunch.

"OK," he said eventually. "Just let me know if you need a... distraction." He let his voice drop on the last word, and was rewarded with a little shiver from Greg.

"What I said earlier about revoking privileges? Forget it. Don't make plans for breakfast."

Checking the body over was a tedious business but Nick was pleased to see Greg doing the job thoroughly. He applied himself to his own search, occasionally glancing over at Greg to be sure that he wasn't about to lose it. It took a while, but eventually Greg announced that he was done and could he get the hell out of here.

Nick looked up from the promising broken bottle that he was dusting for prints and grinned. "Let David know he can take the body away and get yourself a breath of fresh air. We ain't done in here yet."

Greg's shoulders slumped as he looked around the small room. "We have to dust everything?"

"Uh-huh."

"And it's still going to stink."

"Uh-huh."

"Slave driver."

"Maybe later, once we're done with work."

Nick really wished Greg wasn't wearing that stupid mask. Sadly the second or two that Greg paused with his mouth open at Nick actually daring to suggest something kinky would have to live only in his imagination.

"Oh sure," Greg said after a moment. "Maybe, he says. Later, he says. All talk and no action, I say."

************

Much later, Gil Grissom walked into the break room to find Nick leaning against the wall, looking on in amusement as Greg sat flopped in a chair, apparently dead to the world. He paused and sniffed the air. "Decomp?" he asked. Nick nodded.

"I smell like death," Greg complained without moving from his sprawled position.

"You look the part too," Sarah told him as she entered behind Grissom.

"My ego thanks you."

"Lemons," Grissom said. Greg looked up, surprised as much by the fact that neither Nick nor Sarah seemed to be fazed by the apparent non-sequitur as by the statement itself.

Nick took pity on him. "Lemon juice helps break down the fats that cause the stink, so you'll need some lemons when you shower."

Greg scowled. "And when exactly were you planning on telling me this?"

Sarah leant down. "You know," she murmured smugly, "a real man wouldn't mind."

"Oh, the real man's fine," Greg huffed. "I'm the one trying not to toss my cookies the whole time."

Sarah missed the look that Nick shot in Greg's direction, but Grissom didn't. He smiled very slightly; he knew from long observation that Nick didn't cope well when Greg made off-hand comments like that. He was fairly sure that he knew why, but unless it actually compromised his team's ability to work together he wasn't about to bring their suspected relationship up. Also watching Nick trying to be subtle around Greg was one of his few amusements, and he didn't want to give that up unnecessarily.

"So what have you got?" he asked, opting to deflect matters towards business. He looked at Nick. Nick looked at Greg.

Greg looked at Sarah hopefully, then sighed. "Victim was a Matthew Swayne," he said in a sing-song manner, "according to his wallet which I never ever want to smell again. He was found in a sealed up photographic darkroom with a crack in his skull and a blood-covered bottle in the trash. I lifted several million of his prints from around the room—"

"You got prints off a decomp?" Sarah asked disbelievingly.

"We got prints off his police record," Nick told her. "Swayne was released from jail two years ago after he was caught running con games. There wasn't enough of the body left to get DNA, never mind fingerprints."

"Actually that's not strictly true," Greg said, to everyone's surprise. "There are techniques for getting DNA samples out of bone. They were developed after 9-11, but they're tricky to handle with any reliability. Fortunately you have a genius on staff, modesty forbids me from naming myself, so it is an option."

Grissom nodded. "Interesting. Not that you need it on this case, but it's worth bearing in mind."

"Congratulations, Greg," Sarah said drily, "you've just made yourself indispensable in the lab."

While Greg favoured Sarah with a glare, Nick took up the story. "There were two other sets of prints in the room that we didn't get a match for. We're guessing that one of them belongs to the previous owner of the house, but he's deceased and his prints aren't on file."

"So why was the room sealed up?" Grissom asked. "And why was the evidence left there instead of being destroyed?"

"Not to mention what was he doing there in the first place?" Sarah said.

Nick shrugged. "Brass is bringing in the owner's next of kin, maybe he'll have some answers."

***********

Joe Keller turned out to be a somewhat tired looking man in his mid thirties. "What's this all about, officer?" he asked Brass as the policeman walked into the interview room with Nick and Greg.

Brass smiled reassuringly. "It's about your father's old house, Mr Keller. It seems that someone killed a man there."

Keller froze, then closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. "What?" he said faintly.

Nick frowned at the reaction, but wiped the expression from his face before Keller opened his eyes again. There was something a little too deliberate about Keller's movements for his liking, and as a cop he'd learned to trust his instincts in cases like this. Of course, as a CSI he'd learned to trust the evidence instead, but that just meant that these days he trusted his instincts to tell him where to look for the evidence. Right now his instincts were telling him to look at Joe Keller.

Brass opened a thin manilla folder and took out a photograph. "Have you seen this man before," he asked.

Keller looked briefly at the photo before nodding. "Matt Swayne," he said, his lip curling in disdain. "He met my father a year or two back. I thought he'd decided to try leeching off someone else. What happened?"

"We were hoping you could help us clear that up," Nick said pleasantly, gathering up Swayne's file and photo. He let Brass take the lead, listening with one ear as the policeman drew out the story Swayne sponging off Keller senior, at least from his son's point of view.

Most of Nick's attention was taken up glancing through the file without being too obvious about it. He wasn't exactly sure what it was that he was looking for, which didn't help. Nothing leapt out at him, but then again nothing quietened his suspicions about Joe Keller either. He handed the file to Greg and listened more closely as Brass asked the inevitable question about money.

"Yeah, he was trying to get a loan off Dad," Keller said, shrugging. "Claimed there were some debts he had to pay off. We knew he was an ex-con, though, I knew he'd just skip out without paying Dad back."

"Did your father give him the money?" Brass asked.

"No, I persuaded him not to."

After a moment's pause, Nick asked, "Would you say Mr Swayne was often at your father's house?"

Keller gave him a bitter little smile. "Pretty often," he said.

Nick frowned a little at the smile, but only said, "So I suppose it wouldn't have been unusual for him to be in that room. That would explain why we found his prints everywhere." He paused, then started as if something had suddenly occurred to him. "I imagine that a dutiful son like you would have been there pretty often too."

Keller nodded, eyeing Nick narrowly before flicking his eyes to where Brass was sitting in Buddha-like serenity. It was just as well, Nick thought, that he'd missed the sharp look Greg had shot at Nick; by the time Keller looked back, Greg's nose was firmly buried in the file again.

Putting on his most ingratiating smile, Nick asked "I hate to bother you, but could we take a set of your fingerprints? It's just so as we can eliminate yours from all the others that we've found."

Keller didn't look exactly pleased with the idea, but he didn't really have a lot of choice. Despite Nick's diffident wording, refusing the request would look pretty suspicious under the circumstances. He nodded again. "If it'll help with your enquiries," he said slowly.

"How well did your father and Mr Swayne get on?" Greg asked unexpectedly.

"What do you mean?" Keller seemed nervous at the question. Nick watched him carefully, realising what Greg must have picked up on in Swayne's file.

"I'm just trying to get an idea of how well they knew each other. Were they like distant friends? Business partners? Drinking buddies? Lovers?"

Whatever other suggestions Greg might have been about to toss out were lost as Keller surged to his feet. "My father was not gay," he yelled furiously.

"Nobody's saying he was," Brass told him, holding his hands out placatingly. "It's just an extreme example."

"I'm sorry," Keller said, sitting down wearily. "It's just... It's only been a couple of months since he's... gone."

Greg gave him a sympathetic smile and nodded. "No harm, no foul," he said. "I hate to push, but..."

Keller nodded back. "I guess they were kind of like drinking buddies. They had this big thing about baseball, always watching games and arguing about tactics. You know, I don't think Dad ever missed a 51's game." He sounded wistful.

"Well, thank you very much Mr Keller," Brass said, "you've been very helpful. If you'll just wait in here for minute, someone will be along to take your fingerprints."

Out in the corridor, Brass turned and cocked an eyebrow at Nick. "Dutiful son?" he asked, grinning.

"Hey, it worked didn't it?"

"Real smooth, Nick," Greg told him.

"As for you," Brass said, "you really need to watch those smart comments."

"Does this mean you don't love me any more?" Greg fluttered his eyelashes at Brass, who looked at him unmoved.

"Did you really have to suggest to that guy that his dad was gay? I'm not surprised he reacted like that."

"Five will get you ten he was gay," Nick interrupted. Brass blinked. "Think about it, man. Nothing in what you told us about the father said anything about him being into photography, but we found the body in a darkroom."

"Swayne on the other hand got seriously into camera work while he was in the slammer," Greg said, handing the manilla folder back to Brass. "And he definitely was gay. I'll bet Swayne was over at Keller's place a lot more than 'pretty often'."

"Add in a son who's seriously twitchy about the subject and not exactly well-disposed to an ex-con in the first place, and there's your motive."

Brass shrugged. "Just find me the evidence," he said. "We all know he did it for whatever reason, but until you can prove it all we have is our gut feelings and some pretty theories."

"On it," Nick told him. "C'mon Greggo, it's time you practised taking a full set of prints."

*****************

"Do you recognise this, Mr Keller?" Nick asked, flashing his wide, innocent smile. 'This' was the top half of a broken brown reagent bottle, sealed away safely in an evidence bag.

Keller poked gingerly at the bottle. "Uh, no," he said hesitantly. No one in the room was fooled.

"I guess it was a while ago," Greg told him, "but you really ought to. Your prints are all over it."

"So I helped my dad clear up a broken bottle, so what?"

"Uh-uh," Nick said, "that's not how it happened is it? The thing is, most people when they pick up broken glass are kind of careful about it. Your prints say that you picked it up like this." Wary of the sharp glass even through the tough bag, Nick picked up the bottle by its neck, hefting it like a club. "See the way my index finger goes off the broken edge here? We pulled a lovely clear print of your finger off the glass right up to the break. I bet when we put the broken pieces back together again, we'll find that print carries on, and that means that the bottle was in one piece when you picked it up."

Keller stared at bottle in horrified fascination, like a baby bird hypnotised by a snake. He flinched as Nick made a gentle striking motion.

"Let me tell you what happened," Brass said. "Matt Swayne met up with your father somehow, and they hit it off. The neighbours all tell us that he moved in a couple of months before he disappeared. You get all concerned about that like any son would, after all the guy's an ex-con. A queer ex-con.

"So you go round to warn your dad, except that he's out. Swayne is in though, messing about in his darkroom." Brass held up a hand to forestall Keller's comment. "Yeah, his darkroom, because your father may have been a lot of things but he wasn't a photographer, was he?

"You and Swayne argue. He won't go, and you get so angry with him that you just grab the nearest object and take a swing at him."

"I didn't mean to kill him," Keller said in a very small voice, eyes glued to the broken bottle that was once again resting on the table. "He kept saying he wouldn't go, he'd promised my dad not to hurt him. He was pretending to be so nice and I knew it was all a lie, and then he was lying on the ground. I panicked, went out and found Dad. He said he'd take care of everything. The next time I went round he'd plastered over the closet door, and he looked so old..." He looked up at Brass' impassive face. "I never wanted to hurt him."

Brass gave him a small nod, then motioned to one of the uniformed officers standing at the doorway. "Joseph Keller, you are charged with the murder of Matthew Swayne..."

Nick and Greg slipped out as the broken man was read his rights. They walked slowly towards the break room, both lost in thought, and were both jerked back to reality when their pagers went off.

"Doc Robbins wants us," Nick said, squinting at the display.

"Finally," Greg said, without much enthusiasm. Nick grinned, well aware of how thrilled Greg wasn't at the thought of standing around Swayne's corpse again.

"I almost feel sorry for him," Greg mused as they walked down to the morgue. Nick shot him a look. "Keller, I mean. In his screwy way, he was just trying to protect his dad from being ripped off."

"Doesn't excuse murder, G. Now we'll never know whether he was right, or whether they really were in love."

"They were in love," Greg said confidently. "At least Keller senior was."

"How do you figure that?"

"Come on, he sealed up the room rather than dump the body somewhere else. From what the neighbours said he practically turned into a recluse, and a year and a half later he dropped dead. It's classic romance fiction stuff, Nick."

"That doesn't mean that any of it's true. He might not have been able to get the body out without raising suspicions, hidden himself away out of paranoia and just worried himself to death. People have done stranger things."

"Yeah, I know, but I still can't help feeling sorry for the son, even if he is a bigot. Does this happen a lot?"

"The people who do these things, they're people. Some of them are evil, some desperate, some confused, some just plain unlucky. It's not our place to decide whether they deserve to be caught or not, just whether they did it. The rest is up to the courts." Nick paused at the morgue door. "You can't let it get to you, Greg. That's what we've got a system for, so that we don't have to make that kind of call. All we do is speak for the evidence."

"I get it," Greg replied slowly. "I guess I was just expecting us to be dealing with Psychopaths Anonymous all the time. Which is not a good thought all on its own, and I'll shut up now."

Nick reached over and squeezed Greg's hand reassuringly. "OK?" he asked.

Greg sighed. "Yeah," he said. "Come on, let's do this."

Al Robbins was still jotting down notes in the Coroner's file as they entered. "Interesting case you gave me," he said, waving them over. "Physical characteristics all match your suspected victim, at least as far as I can estimate them. David's still matching the dental work, but I'm not expecting any surprises."

"Well, that's reassuring," Greg murmured.

Robbins grinned at him. "Cause of death was a little trickier."

Nick raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Not the fractured skull then?" he asked.

"I'm more inclined to think it was the gunshot," Al told him smugly. "The left side fourth rib was shattered in a manner consistent with a small calibre bullet."

"Shot through the heart," Nick said.

Robbins nodded. "Analysis of the bone fragments tells us that blood had to have been circulating moments beforehand at the very least."

"So he was still alive at the time," Greg translated for his own benefit.

"Yes. The cranial compression would have knocked him out, likely concussed him, possibly killed him if left untreated. The bullet made sure."

"I can't believe I missed that," Nick said.

Greg frowned. "Shouldn't we have at least seen the holes in his shirt?"

"The shirt was pretty rotted, G. I'm kicking myself for not finding the damn bullet."

"So what have we got? Keller bops Swayne on the head and runs for daddy dearest, then someone sneaks in and shoots him while he was down? Who? And why?"

Nick put his head in his hands. "I don't know that, but I do know where that bullet has to be. It's in the floor, under the gunk that used to be Swayne."

Greg visibly paled. Robbins looked at him sympathetically. "His first decomp?" he asked Nick.

"Yeah. Look, I'll deal with it, Greg. I shouldn't have missed it in the first place."

Greg straightened. "I can handle it," he said unconvincingly. "I am supposed to be working this case, not blowing it off because I don't like the smell."

Nick couldn't help but smile. Greg wanted to be out in the field so badly, it was just like him to force himself back somewhere that his lunch really didn't want to be. Fortunately that was an ordeal he didn't have to go through again. "Oh, you aren't going to be getting off easy," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "You've got a bottle to piece back together."

************

Nick paused at the doorway to the evidence room. Retrieving the bullet from the darkroom floor had been every bit as messy and unpleasant as he had feared. Even protected by his gloves, just touching the goo that had been a human being made him feel dirty. He'd sucked it up and done his job, though. Catching criminals wasn't something that he did for the glamour, such as it was; it was more important to Nick that the bad guys ended up behind bars, and if that meant he had to have some stern words with his stomach about what he was handling, then so be it.

Maybe Greg would get there some day. No, scratch that, Nick thought. Greg was stubborn enough that he'd definitely get there, he just didn't have to get there all in one go. He had dealt well enough as far as Nick was concerned with one of the messier cases a CSI could end up with. He had to prove himself with the more run-of-the-mill aspects of investigation too, which is why Nick had left him putting together the reagent bottle like some delicate 3D glass jigsaw.

Right now Greg was looking pretty good sitting at the table, carefully studying the partially reassembled bottle. "You stink," he commented, not even bothering to turn round to look at Nick.

"I know," Nick sighed. "How've you got on?"

"I put enough of the pieces together to prove what you said about Keller's prints, for what it's worth now. I was just checking it over to make sure that we hadn't missed anything else. Not that there'd be any usable DNA left after all this time if someone had cut themselves, but I thought I ought to at least check."

"Good thinking, G. It probably won't pan out, but you never can tell."

"Oh, Brass stopped by earlier. You remember Keller mentioned something about Swayne trying to get money off them? Apparently Swayne's old parole officer confirmed that Swayne had run up some pretty serious debts to some pretty nasty people. He was probably looking for a way to pay them off before they came after him with more than strong language."

Nick nodded. "That makes sense," he said. "The bullet I dug out was pretty chewed up, but Bobby managed to get a probable match on the ballistics database. If it was the same gun, then it's been used all over the state for mob-related shootings."

It was Greg's turn to sigh. "Killed over gambling debts. Somehow it's all a lot less... poetic now. Even if that was depressing me earlier. Hey, do you think it was Keller who shot him?"

"I doubt it," Nick replied. "We'll collect Keller's firearms and test them later, but he hasn't got anything of the right calibre registered. As far as I'm concerned, Brass can have the fun of tracing his movements when those other shootings happened. His father's movements too; it wouldn't be the first time that a sweet old man turned out to be a stone killer, but I can't see it."

"So that's it? We stop now, and the real killer gets away with it?"

"We can't win 'em all," Nick said sadly. "Maybe if the Kellers hadn't hidden it all away we'd have found some physical evidence at the time that we could've used, but not now. We've been over that room twice now, there's nothing more to be found. We just have to wait until our guy makes a mistake, and in the end he will."

"You know, you're adorable when you go all boy scout like that."

"Greg!" Nick blushed furiously, reflexively checking the corridor to make sure that none of their colleagues had overheard such a blatant bit of flirting. "Come on," he said, "shift's over anyway, it's time we got out of here."

He waited while Greg carefully put away the reconstructed bottle, then lead the way down to the parking lot. It had been a long night and he was really looking forward to getting to bed. Once he felt clean again. Which reminded him, he mused, reaching onto the back seat of his car and tossing the package he found there to Greg.

Greg looked up from the string bag of lemons to give Nick a long, calculating stare.

"Does this mean you want a hand washing your hair?"


End file.
